Nanomats

We've all been stalled on the freeway because of some wreck. After a while, when you haven't moved an inch, you see the Hazmat trucks go by. Since we now know what hazmats are, I guess we should go on and have nanomats too.

On the enviro side, some of these nanomats will definitely be hazmats.

Here is a nano-mat that may become extreemly useful in all kinds of things from touch screens to aircraft skin.

'Buckypaper' Holds Promise as Stronger than Steel, Harder than Diamonds
Clean Edge News
October 24, 2005

A Florida State University research group is developing real-world applications for a material that is 10 times lighter than steel -- but 250 times stronger -- with amazing properties that made it highly conductive of heat and electricity.

Buckypaper is made from carbon nanotubes -- amazingly strong fibers about 1/50,000th the diameter of a human hair that were first developed in the early 1990s. Buckypaper owes its name to Buckminsterfullerene, or Carbon 60 -- a type of carbon molecule whose powerful atomic bonds make it twice as hard as a diamond.

Sir Harold Kroto, now a professor and scientist with FSU's department of chemistry and biochemistry, and two other scientists shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of Buckminsterfullerene, nicknamed "buckyballs" for the molecules' spherical shape.

According to Kirby Kemper, FSU's vice president for Research, "The potential applications are mind-boggling."

And here is a non-nano strategy to make hydrogen directly from light.

GaN helps scientists generate hydrogen from water
by Yoshiko Hara
EE Times
October 28, 2005

TOKYO — A research group based in a Tokyo university has succeeded to produce hydrogen using a Gallium Nitride (GaN) device as a photocatalyst, which scientists believe could lead to a process that extracts hydrogen directly from water using only solar energy.

Earlier this week, one of the other project groups announced progress in GaN device performance using new film crystallization techniques.

"We confirmed that nitride semiconductor can produce hydrogen from water," said Kazuhiro Ohkawa, associate professor of Tokyo University. He noted that a light-emitting semiconductor absorbs the same wavelength light that it emits. Relying on the same characteristics for photocatalysis reaction, the group succeeded to extract hydrogen by just exposing light on the nitride film dipped in water.

Research team scientists expect to raise conversion efficiency to 10 percent in three years. By using a solar battery for longer wavelength light, Ohkawa expects efficiency to reach 40 percent."

Finally, here is a photon to electron technology that is based on proteins extracted from cultures.

ACCIONA Energía Develops PV Technology Base on Proteins
Clean Edge News
October 21, 2005

ACCIONA Energía has signed an agreement with the US company MT Technologies to set up a joint venture (BioSolar Energy LLC) to develop bioactive electricity generation systems. The technology involves sunlight-capturing units based on proteins extracted from cultures in the laboratory.

The system, which will take three years to research, sets out to improve efficiency and reduce the costs involved in current silicon cell-based photovoltaic systems. MT Technologies managers estimate that, if the research work is successfully completed as expected, the current cost of photovoltaic technology could be reduced by half in an initial phase, with energy efficiency that would at least double that of the present silicon cells.

In later phases, costs could be reduced up to six times from 3 dollars per kWh to 0.5 dollars, while tripling the energy efficiency of existing photovoltaic technology."

The Petro collapse crowd are not only certain that Peak Oil is here,

They are convinced that there is nothing we can do to replace it.

They are wrong on the second count.

I hope.

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